Technology transfer is about building bridges between science and society. It helps ensure that discoveries and innovations don’t stay confined to the lab but become practical solutions. Protecting this intellectual property and forming industry partnerships are vital challenges that guide ideas toward commercialization, according to Andrew Whiteley, Vice President of Business Development and Technology Transfer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). His team’s work helps turn early-stage ideas into tools and therapies that can benefit patients, researchers, and other groups worldwide.
At CSHL, fundamental research is at the core of everything we do. When our investigators ask challenging scientific questions, they often find that the tools needed to answer these questions haven’t yet been developed. So, they invent them. These new methods, platforms, and technologies not only enhance their research but also drive breakthroughs across the global scientific community.
In this way, technology transfer boosts the impact of basic science. It ensures that the knowledge we generate isn’t just expanding our understanding of life but actively making a difference. This connection between discovery and application enables CSHL’s work to truly change lives.
Host: Phil Renna, Senior Director, Communications | [email protected] | 516-367-8455
Transcript
Phil Renna: Hello, fellow science fans. Thank you for joining us At the Lab, where we talk about inspiring curiosity, discoveries, innovations and the many ways that science makes life better. From Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, my name is Phil Renna, and today we’re discussing technology transfer. As a research laboratory, scientists often develop new technologies in their relentless quest to understand the world we live in. But how do we protect these technologies while sharing them with the rest of the science community and all of us? But before we start, we invite you to subscribe to our regular podcast and to share your favorite episodes. Science is always better when explored together. Now on to our topic and today’s guest, Andrew Whiteley, our Vice President of Business Development and Technology Transfer here at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Let’s jump in.
PR: So, we wanted to chat a bit today about tech transfer and what specifically drew you to Cold Spring Harbor Lab, and maybe give us a little background on your projects and what’s going on.
Andrew Whiteley: Sure. I’d be happy to do that. Thanks so much for spending time with me. So I’ve been with Cold Spring Harbor now for about eight years, and before that, for a couple of years I was actually working as a consultant to the labs for my predecessor, Teri Willey. And it was through her connection that I became the business development and tech transfer head.
PR: Cool, cool. So, Andrew, you know at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, they do a lot of basic research. So, dive into a little bit about how you help scientists move their work forward, you know, especially in identifying what is transferable.
AW: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, tech transfer is about commercializing inventions or discoveries that are made by our scientists here at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Not everybody does that work when they’re pursuing objectives around basic research. However, about a third of our scientists spend a lot of their time thinking about ways in which they can directly impact society through commercialization of their technologies.
PR: Obviously, there’s a lot of young scientists that come in. How do you help them work through the process? How do you identify what is a good piece of technology?
AW: Yeah, we make the effort to get to know all of our scientists as they arrive, talking to them about their objectives, where they think the work is going to be leading them in the future. And then we keep tabs on the way that progress has been made as they start to move towards publications. And through that process, we try to educate our scientists about the processes that need to be done to start to think about commercial interactions with companies that are out there, starting new companies, thinking about licensing of technologies. And through that progressive effort, we start to identify the technologies they have and how we can actually best exploit them in the marketplace.
PR: So, I’m also interested in knowing a little bit more about your team. I know you have people who are concerned about patents and lawyers, and could you tell us a little bit about your team and how you put it together to basically protect the interests of the lab, but also the scientists?
AW: Sure. So, the team is really divided into two key disciplines. There’s the legal disciplines. And so our team has three attorneys on board, and they cover a lot of the technical aspects of doing business with outside companies. So that might well start with something as simple as a non-disclosure agreement or a material transfer agreement and then in future could lead on to sponsored research agreements or indeed, licensing opportunities. And then the other part of my team is business development professionals, who have an understanding of the business parameters and can actually help partner with our scientists to figure out how to build relationships with outside companies and institutions that are interested in the work.
PR: So, Andrew, I know when I started at the Lab back in the ‘80s, the Lab really didn’t focus heavily on tech transfer or even protecting our IPs. And I know over the years that’s become very, very important to us. And I know that the Lab has a rich history in RNA splicing, and there’s a lot of discoveries that were made here at the Lab that the Lab really didn’t benefit [from] or lean into as much as they should have. And I wonder if you could maybe speak a little bit about that and how you’re ensuring that as we move forward, those items are protected.
AW: Yeah. I think that today’s scientists are much more aware of the opportunities that exist in commercialization of their work. As you say, in the past, the Lab’s not seen that as something that was a primary role for the scientist to play. However, whilst there may have been a couple of opportunities that got away because they were essentially put into the public domain without us licensing capability, there were and are entrepreneurial investigators who actually pushed for their ideas to be protected and licensed. And the Lab has benefited from a couple of those deals where even 20 years ago, we were thinking about opportunities, and they became valuable in the commercial domain and resulted in income for both the investigators, because there is a personal gain for scientists that are involved in invention licensing, and for the labs themselves.
PR: Andrew, when thinking about IP and how you protect the intellectual property of the Laboratory, what are the challenges that you faced, I mean, maybe legally, maybe professionally, or even scientifically that the scientists or yourself have to deal with?
AW: Yeah, it’s really an important point. It’s a common misunderstanding that tech transfer equals patent filings. And so whilst patent filings are important to us, quite often the early-stage work that’s conducted at the labs isn’t necessarily able to generate strong patent claims, but they can result in strong relationships that will eventually bring high value patents. And the reason that this is not so clear cut is because of really fundamental changes in the way that the rules around patenting have evolved over the last 20 years. And so today, it’s much tougher to get strong patents, strong claims that can be licensed to third party entities and generate royalty income that we deserve. So, we work a lot on this interception.
AW: So, as a scientist might be, or a PI might be, reaching towards their Science or Nature paper, we talk to them about what’s needed to be done to get a Nature-based paper and outcomes in their research to a commercial opportunity, and it usually involves a couple of additional steps. Now, there is some leeway in the timing that allows us to undertake some of that work, but it’s the biggest point of tension for us that, in many respects, the real currency of success for our PIs is to get great publications. However, the inventions usually need significant additional work done and that can actually hold up the process. So, the tension around timing and publication, the concerns of being gazumped by another group in academia often weighs heavily on the decision whether or not we can really push ahead with a patent or not.
PR: I know that in the past, people could patent genes and other naturally occurring things, but there was a shift in this thinking. Can you explain what that change was? Because my understanding is that you had to create something entirely new through a process for it to be patentable. One of the latest examples that comes to my mind is CRISPR and the ongoing battle with those scientists who initially made the discovery. Could you elaborate a little bit about this and how it works in the science community?
AW: So, you ask a great question about patenting and what does that actually mean? So, patenting is a mechanism where if you have something that’s unique and never described before, you can ask the Patent Office for protection of those ideas. And it’s that underpinning protection that allows companies to invest in new thoughts and new drugs. But it’s not clear cut.
AW: You made the example of CRISPR, and this is subject to a massive fight between the institutions that made original patenting of the idea as was described by Charpentier and Doudna around the use of a procedure to edit DNA and a group in Boston who’s essentially become dominant in this particular field now that actually describe that invention, not just in a eukaryotic system, but in a prokaryotic system. So, while Charpentier and Doudna got a Nobel Prize, they’ve not won the race to a patent, because they didn’t describe their work based on the findings of the Patent Office that would have allowed a person skilled in the art to ensure that that editing could have been done in a eukaryotic cell, which is where the market is. So, this is a great example where first to the paper is not necessarily the first to the patent.
PR: Yeah, true. Another thing that I’ve been thinking about too is SMA: Adrian Krainer, that long history of Rich Roberts working at the lab, working on RNA splicing, then Adrian taking up the mantle and then kind of serendipitously being able to cure SMA or come up with a therapeutic. So, that’s an example of one of the spinoffs or a drug that was developed based on the research that was done here at the Laboratory. And I know that there’s maybe 25 or more spinoffs that the Lab’s had of technology or companies.
AW: Yeah. So, Adrian has been spectacularly successful in the work that he’s done in ASOs. And we continue to see new opportunities coming out of his lab, even today. So, SMA was a project that was conceived and a structure identified that could impact positively these patients that suffer from spinal muscular atrophy. Normally for these serious patients [SMA is] an early death sentence, unfortunately. Now, these patients are surviving really a substantial number of additional years. And every year it’s an additional year because of the impact of the drug. This is a great example where there was a collaboration between scientist and industrial company, in this case Ionis, to essentially develop the therapeutic that was eventually launched as Spinraza and approved for use in treatment of SMA.
AW: And it just shows that much of what we do in tech transfer is to think about the relationships that can actually get us to a point of success, rather than just the unique and sole endeavor of the PI’s lab. And so this is very different to writing a paper and getting that Nature tag on the paper and saying, “OK, well, I was the first one to really discover this,” and very often a small effort, relatively, with the focus that the scientists have. To make a drug is much more complicated. There’s substantial, additional work [that] has to be done to validate, prove that the drug is not going to be toxic, and then eventually fund clinical trials. We simply can’t do all of that ourselves. And whilst it would be nice to think that we could, really, we need strong commercial backers to this type of effort to be successful in the long run.
PR: So, how do you go out and find venture capitalists or companies that want to support the technology that we want to move out to the public?
AW: Yeah, that’s one of the really important parts of our job, and we do that in collaboration with our scientists because our scientists attract the attention of really top-class organizations. So, we know many, many venture capitalists. We talk to them all the time. We talk to companies all of the time. And often our scientists talk to companies. They are approached at scientific meetings. And that’s often the entree into an initial collaboration with a company that might be interested in finding out more about a particular piece of work that the PI is working on. They can sometimes provide compounds to actually advance the research or, and the best thing for us is, money to actually generate data that backs and supports the PI’s primary interests in ways that can actually advance it more quickly. So, it’s an important part of our business, is to think and develop sponsored research agreements with companies that can actually advance research in this early, very early stage of development.
PR: I’d like to address the question about AI and how that plays into scientific research and your job.
AW: Yeah. So, AI, there’s two facets to that. So, there’s actual utilization of AI to help us do our jobs, and I think that’s fairly straightforward. I think it’s not so much different to the way that many different professions will actually utilize generative AI, and that is that we can get AI to take a look at, under the right protections, agreements or relationships that we’re trying to develop. So, we use it as a tool.
AW: But I think the real promise as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory starts to invest in this whole new discipline called neuroAI or biological AI—where the tools that underpin generative AI, which for us is relatively straightforward; anybody can utilize that—think about ways that you can move and use AI, find the applications of AI that can actually help in the drug developments, the diagnostic, the patient management side of things. And so, the investment that we’re making on the hill for the new institution is very important to us. And we will be developing in parallel essentially an AI studio that can actually advance companies at the same pace as the developments of the scientific work is going on. And we think this is going to be a key aspect to the new expansion that the Lab has in hand at the present time.
PR: Andrew, as we look to the future, what do you see the role of tech transfer as we move into this whole new realm?
AW: Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, our business is about relationships. And the one thing that AI can’t do is build a relationship with a third party and ascribe and work on mutually advantageous goals. It’s a good way of churning out data or points of interest. But at the end of the day, in order for technology to be advanced, we have to advance on the back of a relationship with other people to actually make that happen. So what we think is that we’ll use these tools to advance capability in the sphere of influence that we have, and our role will be increasingly about the relationships that we have to build between scientists and their commercial counterparts in industry across the globe. So, I’m very optimistic about how that can improve our efficiency and impacts of the things that we can do, but it certainly won’t take over what we do. It may well help us with humdrum stuff, but the people part is what’s so important for us here.
PR: So, what keeps you up at night? What worries you the most about the future of your job? Not your job in this sense, but the future of what we’re trying to do here and the mission.
AW: You know, the biggest issue is that we’re competing on a global stage, and the resources needed to advance technologies are getting greater and greater. So, our biggest challenge is trying to figure out ways that we can actually bring the capital, the cash to bear to actually advance these discoveries before we start to disclose them in the public domain through our Nature and Science papers. So, just to point out, as soon as something is put into a Nature paper or indeed any journal, it’s deemed as a disclosure. And so, at that point, patenting the underpinning ideas becomes extremely difficult and in most cases impossible to achieve. So, this tension between publication and commercialization will continue to be a big issue. It won’t be an issue if we can find really good ways in which we can raise money to advance discoveries within the institution and with our partners to actually make and develop the technologies further. So, it worries me.
AW: You know, it’s a pretty tough time at the present time to find early-stage capital for inventions, because of the risk profile associated with that work. There’s nothing certain about any of these projects. Whilst we’ve started 25 companies, most companies fail in the end. And so, we’re actually no better than the industry average is. You know, perhaps one in 10 companies will survive from being a startup. And that’s a big thing for us with the size of the institution that we’ve got.
PR: Yeah, and I know the importance, too, of philanthropy at the Laboratory. So, support from local foundations and even the local community has been strong for the Laboratory. And that has driven a lot of that high-risk science that takes place at the Laboratory.
AW: Yeah, I can’t say enough about the importance of thinking through and developing relationships with all the stakeholders involved in a particular idea. And those stakeholders are going to be the patients and the families of people who perhaps have a rare disease. It’s going to include the foundations that are developed and built around common interest in those sorts of issues. It’s going to involve the institutions that are actually treating these patients. It’s going to involve philanthropic support from our backers of the Lab and grant funding to actually advance all of these particular projects. So, more and more, what we do is we find this sort of complexity in a lot of the things that we have to do. We have to bring all of these different stakeholders together to try and establish a common path, a path of interest and motivation in order to get things done, because we have to ask for lots of money in order to advance these projects.
PR: Yeah, and that’s one of the things I think the general public misunderstands about basic science, that it’s really a long path. You know, we’re not immediately thinking about clinical trials and all that. We’re really thinking about, how do you understand the underpinnings of a particular type of cancer, even just at a cellular level, how something works. And from there, discoveries are made.
AW: Yeah. I can’t say enough about the importance that our PIs have in the work that I do. We’re very cognizant of this, and we’re very happy to be working with such a talented group of people that are advancing the cause. And our job is to be good partners to the PIs, to actually figure out ways that we can drive these innovations and drive interest further. And it’s that collaboration that is very much at the heart of the relationship that we have with our PIs and look to increase and grow as an institution.
PR: Well, I want to thank you, Andrew, for chatting with us today. I really do appreciate you coming by and spending some time with us.
AW: Thanks, Phil. I really appreciate being able to reach out. I think we’ve looked a little bit at the broader scope of technology transfer, and I’m always encouraging our PIs who’ve got ideas that before they push that paper out, come talk to us about how we can actually protect those ideas and move them forward to the betterment of society.
PR: Science is a shared and collaborative story. Discovery and innovation come from curiosity inherent in each of us. Thank you for exploring science by listening and learning right alongside us. If you’re interested in more news about Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s research, subscribe to this podcast, sign up for our newsletter, and follow us on social media to see how science impacts you. To support research at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, visit give.cshl.edu. Because science makes life better.